Farmer Coalition Offers $250K Prize For Blueberry Picking Robot (robohub.org)

Hallie Siegel writes: Having spent many a back breaking hour in deep woods Ontario picking wild blueberries in summer time, I can only imagine the challenge of farming and harvesting these awesome little flavour nuggets. Blueberries are in record demand (probably my son alone accounts for a significant percentage of that!) so it's no surprise, really, that a coalition of farmers has banded together to offer a prize for automated blueberry picking solutions. We've seen competitions and challenges spur innovation in other areas of robotics — think robocar — why not blueberry picking? Can't wait to see the results of this one.

Comments

Cost

[Anonymous Coward]

Good luck being cheaper than darker skinned humans.

Re:Cost

[KGIII]

I live in the home of the Great Wild Maine Blueberry and it is nommy. For starters, you're correct. We have no brown people until harvest season - then we have a lot of them. They stick around for the apple picking season. Then they disappear like the wind. Often, they're Jamaican. I have no idea why. A buddy doesn't hire them, they're from a separate company supplied by Wyman Blueberry or something or other. He hires locals.

Also, blueberries are seldom "picked" per se. Some, very few, are hand-picked and those will cost you a small fortune. The Wild Maine Blueberry (which is nommy) is a low-bush plant and not to be confused with cultivated berries which are larger and, often, on taller plants. The blueberries are raked with a device that is similar to a cranberry rake, they just have less space between the tines. You gently pull the rake up, from beneath the berries, and tilt it forward while pulling gently upwards. You repeat this until the berries fill the back portion. Then, leaving some space for the wind to blow, you dump the berries into your pail. Why? The wind winnows out the berries and your bucket will be heavier and the berries cleaner.

You also do it gently so that you squish fewer berries - berries that are squished are suitable only for the cannery. Berries that go to the cannery don't make as much money. Unfortunately, most berries go to the cannery these days. You need to know the right people to be able to get the good stuff - which I do. I generally get an obscene amount of berries and freeze them after cleaning them. I also make blueberry jelly and blueberry pie. I can't seem to make a good jam, however. I just can't get it so that it's not runny. I'll learn...

There's quite an art to raking them. As I mentioned above, I've a friend who owns around 500 acres of berries. I get some healthy exercise helping him out. In the spring we go and burn the fields every other year. We put chemicals on the fields to kill the Poplar tree saplings. We put hay on the fields after the season is over - that's burned off the following year, in the spring, while the snow is still in the woods but not in the fields - as it is wont to do, most years. They've an automated burning machine but that's set a hill, down in Vienna, ME, ablaze on more than one occasion. He (which also seem to mean me most years) doesn't subscribe to that highfalutin newfangled stuff - it's done the way it was done by his father before and his father before that. Legend says, his grand father was the one to invent the blueberry winnowing machine. I've no idea of the veracity, they're all liars.

Truth be told, I'm not quite sure how I got roped into helping. I started just buying blueberries but soon got asked if I wanted to see how it worked. Not long after, I was invited to give it a shot. Pretty soon, I'd filled my belly and my pail was empty. This meant that I should probably give him money. So, I gave him money but was told I should probably fill a pail. Soon, that turned into a few. Eventually, I figured out that I was paying to work. I'm not quite sure how that state of affairs happened but I did stop paying and now I don't actually pay for my heap of berries but I earn them by helping out. He's offered to pay me, numerous times, but I think he only offers to be polite and knowing that I'll decline.

If you've never had the Nommy Wild Maine Blueberry then you're missing out. They're not as sweet as the cultivated berries and, often times, not as large. However, they're full of flavor and my doctor (another lying bastard) tells me that they're good for me. He's probably a member of the blueberry cartel. There is actually quite a bit of money in blueberries, they're one of the highest paying crops around. They're just finicky and a bitch to harvest. They do have automated raking machines but they don't actually result in berries you'd want to buy unless you were buying them canned. Let's just say, they don't treat the berries right.

So, while someone may develop a machine to autonomously harvest berries,

Re:Cost

[dunkelfalke]

There are, in fact, several species of blueberries. The commercial cultivates in the USA and Europe are nowadays (unfortunately) the American high brush blueberries, but the European wild blueberry tastes far more intensive. They are small berries with violet flesh and red-violet juice and they will colour your tongue to the hue of the tongue of a Chow-Chow dog.

Re:Cost

[KGIII]

There are indeed. I've tried quite a few of the various species over the years. I love my blueberries. I recently shared a story about them... Lemme see if I can find it... Nope, was more than a few days ago. Basically, as a wee toddler - not much larger - 3 - 5 years old, I ate some blueberries and, as it turns out, they were inside bear poop. Yup... I ate bear poop blueberries. *sighs* I was sharing it when someone was alarmed about their being power lines near their house and worried about their kids.

I really don't like the cultivated berries as much. Sure, they're sweeter but they also feel mealy. They're just not as good. I don't know if I have had the variety you speak of but it's possible. If you ever get to my neck of the woods, I'll share some of my stash with you. We have one subspecies, I'm not even sure if it has a name, that you find in patches. They're dark, almost black. They also tend to grow a bit larger. They are the epitome of heaven in a little package direct from Mother Nature herself. I usually separate those out and gorge myself on them instead of being patient and freezing them.

Man, I'm hundreds of miles from home and my stash of blueberries. Stupid Slashdot...

Re: Cost

[lisaparratt]

Preserving sugar is large grain sugar suitable for making jams and jellies. The theory is the smaller surface area results in less froth and scum. Jamming sugar is that with pectin added. I've never needed to add pectin, though - I've just added some lemon juice if I have trouble getting it to set. Frequently, my problem is the opposite, and I've got lots of over thick jam in the cupboard.

Re:Cost

[KGIII]

It's a blueberry. I'd not get this wrong, trust me on this. ;-) It's one of the ones listed here:

http://umaine.edu/blueberries/...

Not all blueberries are blue. They're pink, blue, dark red, some are kind of purple, and some are black - they vary a bit in between the shades. I've also noted your other reply. I'll look into it. ;-) Jams are a pain in my ass. I make a mean jelly, though.

Good luck with that

[duke_cheetah2003]

I think if someone invents such a contraption, they stand to make WAY more than a $250k prize by patenting and manufacturing the thing themselves and selling it to farmers. Really. Who would be stupid enough to give away such an invention for a mere $250k?

Re:Good luck with that

[radarskiy]

"Who would be stupid enough to give away such an invention for a mere $250k?"

-1, irrelevant

The conditions of the contest do not involve alienating all rights.

Re:Good luck with that

[fred911]

Case in point, here's what today's $200k solution looks like. http://www.oxbocorp.com/Produc... You should be able to add telemetry, control and associated support systems for less than $50k.

Re:Good luck with that

[monkeyxpress]

Absolutely. I worked for a small blueberry farmer who was making sorting equipment back in the early 2000s. It didn't take him long before he was making more from the machines (they were much more basic than a picking machine) than his entire blueberry farm. There is big money in reducing the need for seasonal labour and $250k is peanuts.

As an aside, one of the things that was common on the blueberry farms was to use a tree shaker to harvest the lower grade fruit. It was only the really high quality fruit that was hand picked. I never enquired as to what the main benefits of this were (whether quality or yield?), but the tree shakers seemed to work pretty well at getting everything out of the tree and weren't exactly complex pieces of equipment. I wonder if that puts more constraints on the economics of such a project that make it less attractive for agricultural equipment manufacturers.

Re:Good luck with that

[Wycliffe]

I think if someone invents such a contraption, they stand to make WAY more than a $250k prize by patenting and manufacturing the thing themselves and selling it to farmers. Really. Who would be stupid enough to give away such an invention for a mere $250k?

It doesn't matter. The farmers still win. The $250k is to get people interested in looking into the problem. By getting published on slashdot, they are already halfway to their goal as their primary goal is publicity. If someone solves the problem and wants to sell them the machine, the farmers can keep their $250k and still come out ahead as they still accomplished the goal of getting someone to create the machine for them.

Re:Easily done

[Aighearach]

If you have a special drive just to break the berries, my advice is to skip this contest and build a jam factory.

Re:Easily done

[KGIII]

I'm going to assume you know nothing about blueberries. (The vary in color, for starters - quite a bit actually, up to and including pink and black.) Also, they're kind of complicated to harvest. 'Tis not an easy thing to do, I suspect. They also don't all tend to ripen at the same time and may well be mixed in with some other berry in the low bushes. I forget the name of that berry but it's almost identical to the blueberry only it grows on a different plant (coniferous shrub) and is poisonous. It too grows in shallow and acidic soil.

This actually is kind of difficult, I suspect. They have an electric raking machine but it's still needing to be guided by a user. It also mashes the damned things all to hell and anyone who uses it is a spawn of Satan. In fact, for even suggesting such a thing, you're dead to me. You're dead to me Khyber! Dead to me, indeed!

I take my fucking blueberries serious. I'll straight up stab a mother fucker for messing with my blueberries.

If it's easily done, why don't you do it?

[drinkypoo]

I'll take my $250K, now.

You'll take your $250K when you get it working, and not until. Smarter people than you have already been trying.

If it's so easy, why don't you put a robot where your mouth is, and pick some fucking blueberries with it?

Too little to be serious ... put up real money!

[fygment]

Presumably a prototype has to be built, right? Because no one would be stupid enough to give a prize for a plan on paper, right?

So how many decent prototypes would an inventor have to go through before there's a decent working model?

And if each prototype costs $10-20k, the actual reward for the inventor gets smaller and smaller ... so small that only garage builders are likely to give it a try. A bona fide company with resources, say engineers/techs at $60K a year, machine shops, taxes, are unlikely to give the matter any thought. A university might, but then you will have to wait several years.

TL:DR - you get what you pay for. Put up a $1 million dollar prize and you might see some serious interest.

Re:We should hate farmers, right?

[ShanghaiBill]

Someone willfully saved seed he knew to belong to Monsanto, and then he got nailed.

That was Percy Schmeiser. He planted canola adjacent to his neighbors Roundup-Ready crop, then saved the seed from that section of his field, and only from that section. The following year, he sprayed his field with Roundup to kill the plants without the Monsanto gene. He now had pure RR canola, which he used and benefited from in the following years. Monsanto asked him to pay a license fee, he refused, so Monsanto sued him. Since this was clearly a case of blatant intentional infringement, and Schmeiser openly admitted to it, Monsanto won.

It's still wrong

Why is it wrong? Or at least any more wrong than enforcing any other patent?

Re:We should hate farmers, right?

[ShanghaiBill]

By crosspolonization.

No. The plant doesn't reproduce. It doesn't produce pollen, or viable seeds. That is the whole point.

By viruses.

In which case the gene prevents it own propagation into the following generation.

There are about a dozen mechanisms how plants transfer genes

So? As soon as a plant acquires this gene it will STOP REPRODUCING. That is the whole point. It is conceivable that the gene could somehow get inserted into another plant, via a virus or whatever, but that would be a dead end.

Genes propagate and spread because they enhance the fitness of their hosts. A terminator gene minimizes fitness to zero.